I REMEMBER AT AN EARLY AGE someone telling me that God is love. As I moved along in life, especially when I entered religious life, becoming a Sister of St. Francis of Sylvania, Ohio, I actually felt that love through the many people and experiences in my life. As I reflect on the meaning of Christmas from a Christian/Catholic perspective, I find myself coming back to this early memory of just who God is and why Christmas has grown into such a beautiful and precious feast. I won’t use “holiday” to describe this feast in this article because I truly want to emphasize what this feast means to me and to many of us who identify ourselves as Christians. I trust that my Muslim friends and readers who hold other beliefs about God will allow me to share what I believe as I reflect on this important feast in December, 2021.
Christmas is a significant feast because it is the celebration of the Son of God coming to earth in the form of a defenseless baby in Bethlehem. We believe that Jesus, born of Mary, and foster son of Joseph, came to this planet to show us how to live and love and get along with one another. We call Jesus the Son of God and the Scriptures attest to this fact especially at the Baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist, where people around the event heard a voice say, “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” (Matthew 3:36)
Many Christians believe that Jesus came to save us from our sins, and that may very well be true. Franciscan theologian John Don Scotus, however, goes deeper into the meaning of Christ’s birth by describing his coming, his Incarnation, as God wanting to become one of us out of sheer love for us. Jesus would have come no matter what. Scotus reasoned that the Incarnation is the effect of God freely choosing to end his self-isolation and show who and what he is to that creation. The Incarnation, therefore, in Franciscan spirituality, is centered on love and not sin.
I don’t know about you, but I love to think of God, Jesus, and Christmas in light of what John Dun Scotus shares in his theological insight about the purpose of Jesus’s coming to earth to simply share his Father’s love with us as a human being, as one of us. The Gospels certainly contain many parables and stories from Jesus about just how we can be our best selves while on earth, and perhaps as we try to live as our best selves we are already in heaven or in the Kingdom of God as Jesus often referred to heaven. We can especially pull this off by simply doing what Jesus often reminded us to do by word and example: Love God and our neighbor as ourselves. This is the meaning of Christmas for many of us who would rather not get caught up in the secular holiday it has become.
Let’s make God the more of our lives this Christmas as we continue to recover from the effects of COVID and all that it has done to remind us of how precious life is and how much love has helped us to recover the best of ourselves. Oh, come all you faithful, joyful and triumphant…Oh, come let us adore him, Christ the Lord.
Sister Mary Thill is a Sylvania Franciscan Sister. She can be reached at mthill@sistersosf.org.
We are born out of love.
We live in love.
We are destined for love.
-Blessed Raymon Llull
Everything that exists speaks of
God, reflects that love energy of God.
But God is more than anything that exists.
God is always the more of our lives.
We can’t contain God.
If we try to control God, that’s not God;
God always spills over our lives.
So, God is our future.
-Sister Ilia Delio
